John Riley is the founder and publisher of Morgan Reynolds Publishing, an independent educational publisher in Greensboro, North Carolina. Before founding Morgan Reynolds, he worked as a freelance writer and teacher. His fiction and poetry have appeared in Corradi, Aberrations, Hardboiled, The Houston Literary Review, SmokeLong Quarterly and Hobble Creek Review.
Summer 2009
Table of Contents - Vol. V, No. 2
Poetry Essays Translations Fiction
John Riley
There are no city-chewed streets,
only white and lilac blooming dogwood trees.
Cars with whisper engines
sweep past.
It is spring, not mid-winter,
already my light coat is a burden.
It is true, at every early-morning,
still dark, or pale-shadowed corner,
I meet my father, too.
My age, he is dead,
stares as blindly
as in life.
Why ask him to be forgiven
when I know not who I hurt?
I injure only the living.
He tracks my every step.
He is what has passed, while I wait
to be spirited.
Tonight,
I lay my head down with the dead.
© John Riley
